Forty, Fabulous and Fae Page 4

  “What?” I demanded, snapping my neck up to look fully at him.

  The man didn’t even flinch when I moved abruptly, though, which was all the more beneficial for me, because I got a perfect view of his roughened features.

  He didn’t look like the kind of man to frequent a Portland hipster coffee shop. He didn’t even look like the kind of man who would be in Portland. He had a long, manly nose, and what I assumed was a perfectly chiseled jaw hidden under his bushy brown beard. Come to think of it, he looked a lot like the cowboys I’d see in old TV shows.

  An all-American man.

  The man in question flashed his light grey eyes at me and shot me a half smile.

  “You always talk to strangers this way?” he asked.

  “What way?” I snapped, before I caught myself. “Oh… uh, no, sorry. I just wasn’t expecting anyone to ask me about these.” I gesticulated wildly toward the papers spread out in front of me.

  “When I see a normal citizen taking an interest in my case, I’ve got to ask,” he shrugged.

  “Your case?” My eyebrows nearly shot into my hairline. “Are you a detective?”

  “Something like that.”

  There was something in his response that didn’t quite sit well with me. The way his eyes left mine when he answered forced me to wonder what this man was, and, more importantly, who he was.

  Until, of course, I reminded myself that it didn’t at all matter to me. I was just doing some reading, nothing more. It wouldn’t matter if this guy was the killer himself, so long as he didn’t target me.

  “May I sit down?” He asked.

  Before I could answer, he went right ahead and sat down in the seat across from me.

  “I didn’t say yes,” I said quickly.

  “But you would have,” he replied with a shrug and a knowing grin.

  Even though he was right, this little attitude of his ticked me off.

  “Look, I’m just doing some reading out of curiosity,” I told him. “I’ve got no interest in this case.”

  “Seems to me like you do,” he declared. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of going down to the library and looking up articles from forty-five years ago.”

  Instinctively, I shoved the papers away from me as if to show that I didn’t care about what they said. To my absolute shock, as I did, this completely random stranger reached out and grabbed my hand in his own.

  For a split second, I was paralyzed. His hand was warm and rough, and fit over mine in a way that reminded me so much of Kenneth I felt my heart crack just a little bit. Even more, though, I was entranced by those steely gray eyes in front of me as they bore into my own, almost as if he was looking right into the deepest, most well hidden parts of my soul.

  Like a plane crash, I came back down to Earth and yanked my hand from his.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  My tone was meant to send this stranger into a fit of embarrassment, but instead, he looked… interested? I wasn’t even sure how to describe the expression on his face.

  “Just introducing myself,” he replied. “I’m Hunter. And that’s my case you’re looking at.”

  I glanced down at the papers in front of me, taking in the perfect, inky black typeface and the black and white picture of the scene outside of Geneva’s mansion, and then back at Hunter.

  “You’re a cold case cop?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” he replied. “I’ve been hired by a private firm to look into the recent murders here in Portland. You’re not the only one to tie these two events together.”

  “Well, actually…” I was about to tell him that it was Grams who’d made the connection, not me, before I thought better about it. My heart might have started to lust after Hunter and his steely gray eyes, but my mind still knew enough to remind me not to tell a perfect stranger my business.

  Even if that business was an insane curiosity with murders that happened nearly fifty years prior.

  “Actually what?” He prompted.

  “Actually, I have to go,” I said abruptly, gathering up my papers into a haphazard pile and heading straight for the door. “I’ve got someone I have to meet.”

  “I thought you might want to talk about the case, though.” Hunter stood up in a flash and blocked my path in a way that should have sent me into a fit of indignation. And it probably would have, if I hadn’t noticed the way he smelled like a perfectly smoky campfire.

  “I’m not a P.I.” I shook my head. “Good luck figuring it out.”

  And with that, I ran out of the coffee shop and onto the street. Something about Hunter gave me the heebie jeebies.

  But something else about him made me want to sit down and talk to him for hours on end. Somehow, that was even worse.

  6

  I don’t know how, but my encounter with Hunter had shaken me up.

  Nothing ever shook me up.

  There was just something about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It wasn’t necessarily bad, I didn’t think. It was more like… intriguing. I wanted to know more about him. That, I could not have. No way was I about to let myself get entangled, in any way, with another man after what Kenneth had done.

  Even if that man could answer some semi-burning questions I had about this case. The D.A. in me knew that Hunter probably had a lot of information tucked away in his brain. P.I.s always did. Most of the time, they even knew more than the cops did.

  I had to get Hunter, and this case that wasn’t even mine to begin with, off of my mind. I was walking down the street, hell bent on getting as far away from the coffee shop as I possibly could, when a tiny little bookstore caught my eye. It was new, I could tell, since the sign was still bright and shiny, which was a near impossibility after more than a season of Portland rain.

  Stuffing the papers deep into my bag, I ducked into the shop. Why I didn’t just toss them in the trash, I had no idea. This case was stuck with me, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

  A tiny, brass bell clanged over the door as I entered, and I was immediately hit by the musky, aged aroma of old books and yellowed paper.

  God, I loved that smell. It reminded me of childhood, and rainy days spent alone in the library with nothing but a stack of good books to keep me company.

  “Hello, can I help you?” The salesclerk, a woman who looked to be about my age, approached me with a smile. She had dirty blonde hair that had been twisted into dreadlocks, a huge hoop through her septum, and wore a bright purple, floor length dress that looked as if it belonged in the seventies.

  “I’m just browsing,” I told her politely.

  “Of course,” she nodded. “Is there any particular genre—”

  Suddenly, the woman’s smile fell flat, and her feet faltered. She froze about six feet away from me, and her light brown eyes went wider than cantaloupes.

  “Oh my,” she breathed.

  Instantly, I whipped around, terrified she’d seen something behind me.

  But the store was empty, save for a group of middle school kids messing around in the science fiction section to my right.

  “Is something wrong?” I demanded worriedly.

  “I just… your energy is so…” her words trailed off, and she just continued to stare at me in a way that bordered on rude.

  “My energy is what?” I prompted.

  Before she could say another word, there was a loud crash, and a gasp from the boys.

  “Dude, what the heck?” One of the kids cried. The saleswoman’s gaze snapped away from me to take in the kids, who had managed to knock over two entire stacks of precariously displayed books.

  “Boys, what did I say earlier?” She demanded as she swept over to go and fix their mess.

  Leaving me totally in the dark as to what was so off about my ‘energy.’

  Shrugging, I continued on through the shop, chalking it up to yet another Portland hippie acting just a little bit strange.

  The layout of the shop made absolut
ely no sense, so I decided to just start at the back and work my way forward, browsing for something interesting to occupy my mind while I tried to figure out my next move.

  In the very back of the shop, right next to the section of strange looking cookbooks with yellowed pages that signaled their age, was a section that had been walled off with a bright, clean white curtain. It was a strange thing to see in a bookstore. Curiously, I pulled the curtain aside with one hand, wondering what needed to be shielded from the eyes of the customers.

  And what I saw behind the curtain looked way too much like Mom and Grams’ shop for my comfort.

  So of course, I stepped inside. Reigning in my curiosity had never been my strong suit.

  The occult section, though out of place in this small bookshop, was organized and filled with objects I recognized which meant, as far as fake magic went, the person who owned this place knew what they were doing. There were crystals and potions, runes and necklaces for protection, and a plethora of other objects that, to the untrained eye, would have seemed just weird. But, growing up with the owners of an occult shop had taught me what each item was for.

  There was a barrel of wolfsbane with a scoop in it, so curious customers could bag their own. And just past that was a little shelf, with a row of pictures and three lit candles. It looked sort of like a shrine.

  As I got closer, I realized that it actually was a shrine, dedicated to the three women who had been murdered recently. There was a picture of each one of them behind a lit candle and surrounded by a circle of pure white salt.

  “Strange,” I murmured aloud.

  I’d never seen anything quite like it, even at home, with Mom and Grams doing all sorts of strange things and calling them “rituals” or “spells.” I couldn’t tell exactly what the benefit of it was for. I knew that candles were meant to signal light and protection, and salt was also for protection.

  Maybe these women had all been regulars at the store? Either that, or whoever had created this little altar just wanted to pray for them. It was nice, I supposed.

  But what wasn’t nice was the table on the other side of the shelf. It was one of those entryway tables, with a purple cloth laid over it. On top of the table were ten more pictures, but these ones didn’t have frames. Instead, they were laid out next to each other, forming a pentagram, and surrounded by a circle of candles. In between each photo was a little rock with a Celtic rune carved into it.

  My feet carried me forward so I could get a better look at the ten photos on display. As soon as I did, my heart froze in my chest, and a shiver of strange fear undulated through my body.

  I recognized two of the pictures. One was a photo of my Grams from about ten years before. She was smiling in it, but I could tell the picture had been blown up, like someone had gotten it off of Facebook. The second one was of my mom. It was a picture I’d taken, at my wedding.

  There was a third picture there, too, of the woman who had greeted me.

  I wasn’t at all sure what I was seeing, but something in me wanted to reach out and touch the photos, to feel the smoothness of the paper underneath my fingertips, almost like I wanted to make sure the women were safe within the confinements of the photographs. I watched my hand reaching out toward the little altar, but the moment I crossed the ring of candles, my entire arm was shocked, as if a bolt of lightning had struck down and run up my appendage, and then my body was shoved backward by an impossibly strong force.

  The flames of the candles leapt five feet into the air with a flickering roar, lighting the room in a dance of orange and red that terrified me to the core. I gasped in shock as I stumbled backward, at once terrified and disbelieving.

  “Ow!” A woman’s voice cried as I stepped on her foot in my haste to escape the giant flames.

  “Sorry!” It was a reflex apology. I spun around to find the saleswoman behind me, staring me down with that same confused and intrigued expression.

  “What did you do?” She gulped, staring at the flames.

  “You see them, too?” I needed to convince myself I wasn’t a total lunatic.

  As she nodded, the flames shrunk back to a normal size, the room went back to the drab white color, and the lightning evaporated from my arm.

  “What have you done?” She demanded again. Suddenly, the sweet, if strange demeanor she’d held before disappeared, replaced with a thunderous anger.

  “Nothing!” I cried out as she rushed past me and hunched over the table, searching to fix whatever I had screwed up.

  I took the opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge. I had no idea what had just happened, and I didn’t plan on sticking around long enough to find out. There wasn’t any way I could have convinced myself that my eyes were playing tricks on me.

  I knew what I saw. One second, those flames were a half inch tall, and the next, they were high enough to scorch the ceiling. For the umpteenth time, the strange, nervous feeling returned to my gut, and I was faced with the immense, unbearable notion that there was something I was missing, something I wasn’t being told.

  And whatever it was, those murders were connected to it somehow. Three dead women, and ten other women in those photos. If I hadn’t seen a picture of the saleswoman herself, I might have wondered if she was the killer, and those were her targets.

  But she wouldn’t be targeting herself.

  I came home to a quiet house. Mom and Grams were both in the kitchen, but neither one of them made a sound as I blew past them and into my bedroom. I couldn’t focus on a conversation with them just yet. There were too many thoughts and questions swirling around in my own brain.

  The first of which was the insatiable need to investigate this case. Somehow, Mom and Grams were connected to it. They were afraid they’d be next, and I had to make sure that didn’t happen.

  I didn’t have to believe in magic and witches to know that there was a killer on the lam, targeting women in Portland. And somehow, the dead women were connected to my family.

  Stressed, I tossed my bag into the corner of my room, and then threw myself down on the bed so I could stare up at the ceiling in a moment of sultry, teenage-like angst. I rolled over and stared at the papers spilling out of the khaki brown bag, pure and white, and full of a mystery from decades ago. There was not a doubt in my mind that everything was connected. I just wasn’t sure why yet.

  As I lay there, pondering, I noticed a tiny, creamy piece of paper that stood out from the others.

  Curiously, I got up to go and see what it was. Picking it up, I could tell it was a business card with a name on it.

  Hunter Black.

  Right underneath that was a phone number. Somehow, the sneaky bastard had managed to slip this card into my things without me even realizing it. Which, I supposed, was a good thing. A P.I. seemed like just the kind of friend I needed.

  Quickly, I yanked out my cell and dialed the number. That familiar, gruff voice picked up the phone.

  “Hunter Black, private investigator.”

  “Sneaky little trick, sticking your card into my stack of papers,” I told him.

  “Ahh, mystery girl, I was wondering when you’d call,” he chuckled. “Finally decided you wanna talk to me about this case?”

  “Not exactly,” I shot back. “I want to propose a mutually beneficial relationship. We work together to figure this thing out.”

  “Why are you suddenly so involved?”

  “Let’s just say, this case got personal, and leave it at that,” I replied. “You in or you out?”

  “I don’t work in teams,” he replied. “Especially with people I don’t know.”

  “Look, I’m a D.A., okay?” I hadn’t wanted to pull out my resume like that, but I couldn’t think of another way to get this guy to let me team up with him. I didn’t blame him for being hesitant, but that also wasn’t my biggest concern. Right now, I just needed to get his knowledge and expertise.

  “Yeahhh, D.A.s don’t work with P.I.s.” I could almost hear him shaking his head.


  “Listen, I’m going to keep calling you until you say yes,” I sighed. “So either you give in now, or get ready to have your phone bombarded.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. I was nervous I’d pushed him too far, that he’d say no out of spite and just leave it at that.

  But then, finally, he let out a single, low whistle.

  “Alright, Ms. District Attorney,” he said. “You’ve got yourself a deal. Meet me tomorrow. Rockstar Coffee. One p.m.”

  And then he hung up the phone.

  A proud grin spread over my lips, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hung next to the bed.

  I looked alive. Really, truly alive. There was a sparkle in my green eyes that hadn’t been there in a long time, and a flush to my usually pale cheeks.

  I’d moved back to Portland to find the woman I’d lost. It looked like she was starting to come back to me.

  7

  I pulled up to Rockstar Coffee in my Mom’s Mustang precisely five minutes before one p.m. the next day. Mom, of course had been very nosy, and attempted to ask me all sorts of questions about where I was going and what I was doing, as if I was still in high school.

  I managed to artfully avoid all of her queries and ducked out while she and Grams were in the middle of a rather heated discussion about whether or not they should change their crystal supplier. Apparently, there was a woman who trekked up and down the Western part of Africa once a year, gathering crystals from different places, and Grams wanted to buy her entire stock out. Mom, on the other hand, thought the woman’s crystals were far too expensive.

  As far as I was concerned, they were just a bunch of really pretty rocks. It shouldn’t matter if they came from Africa or Lake Tahoe.

  Or did it? Admittedly, after the last two days, I was a little unsure. The tick of my blinker blurred into the background as I thought over everything that had happened this week.

  The boxes that had closed by themselves. The way people had seemed to listen to me on my flight. The weird conversation Mom, Dina, and Grams had in the break room the other day.